Il-Frammenti ta’ Saffo (The Fragments of Sappho) encompass joy and longing, passion and desire. Writer and translator Warren Bartolo speaks to Lara Zammit about what survives of the elusive poet.

The translator Warren Bartolo. Photo: Megan Andrea Poon

LZ: Il-Frammenti ta’ Saffo − a new publication by Warren Bartolo published by EDE Books − is the complete translation into Maltese from the original Ancient Greek of the poetic fragments of the enigmatic lyric poet Sappho. What drew you towards these fragments and the woman behind them? What insights have you gained into the poet herself by translating her work?

WB: Probably what drew me to her work is the fact that Sappho had the desire to tell her story. And it was a girl’s story − a girl who loved girls (cf. Audrey Wollen’s ‘Sad Girl Theory’). I mean, she had the desire to use the first-person pronoun “I”. Very Annie Ernaux, perhaps.

I was never really interested in those classical texts about armies, battles or elephants. The first time I read one of her poems was when I was 16, and I felt some sort of ecstasy. I felt the same thing when I recently read Pietru Caxaro’s Il-Kantilena… I couldn’t go to sleep. 

I found my way into her life quite with ease. She was very infectious to me. Her fragments are proto-fragments d’un discours amoureux – I loved that they were broken poems, which spoke about her love for girls in a girly microcosm.

I think one of the things that is so interesting about her poetry is that it manifests the queerness of the lonely ugly girl (Ancient commentators frequently remarked upon her appearance).

I wish I could speak about Sappho in the same way Chris Kraus speaks about Kathy Acker, but we don’t know much about Sappho. But, in a way, I feel like I have learned a lot about her – I think Gayatri Spivak said something like ‘translation is the most intimate act of reading’, and I felt very intimate with her. But I think I’m a bit heartbroken too.

LZ: The British poet Christina Rossetti remembers Sappho through heavy sighs. Her fragments encompass joy and longing, passion and desire and touch on religion, aristocratic life, aging and the passage of time. What in your view are the most striking aspects of her surviving poems and fragments?

WB: Perhaps the most striking aspect is the survival of her poetry itself. Much like Jean Genet’s manuscript of Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs, burned by a prison guard, or Sylvia Plath’s black-ledger diaries, burned by her husband, or Simone de Beauvoir’s recently discovered manuscript Les Inseparables (which speaks about her relationship with Zaza), Sappho’s poetry has a long history of death, destruction, survival and discovery.

Sappho’s poetry has a long history of death, destruction, survival, and discovery

Sappho is vulnerable, and she has an absolute openness to the annihilation of the self. She speaks of a wide range of subjects, including philosophy, she really is the Girl-As-Philosopher. She muses about the passage of time; in a way she desires perhaps to become posthuman, or is sad that she’s not one, (Imma x’nista’ nagħmel?/ Jekk int bniedem ma tistax tkun bla tmiem. Fr. 58ċ).

She also mentions her hair a lot. I was translating Sappho while I was reading the works of Hervé Guibert and I remember I had a document where I was listing instances where both Sappho and Guibert mention their hair.

She also theorises on beauty and aesthetics in a powerful fragment where she boldly announces that what is beautiful is what is absent (Fr. 16).

LZ: Can you speak about the task of translating Sappho into Maltese? What has the Maltese language brought out of these poems that, say, an English translation might not?

WB: Understanding and translating Sappho is a project, a process, really and truly − a perpetual engagement with what she means. It’s always ‘trying to translate’. At many points, I thought that maybe I should never put an end to this project – leave it as an open document on my laptop.  When I started the project, I would immediately start sweating with anxiety when I would open the 1971 Eva Maria Voigt volume of her poetry and see a page crammed with Ancient Greek words and symbols, gaps and diacritics.

It was an overwhelming sight and it took me a while to get used to looking at this sort of text.

Often I would only work on her poetry for five minutes, close my laptop and go to sleep. But very often, I would wake up in the middle of the night and open my laptop again.

Little by little, there began to be an incredible friction of feeling between Sappho’s self and mine. I was getting more comfortable as I got more familiar with her dialect, language and style.

I’m not sure what my Maltese translation brings out that an English one doesn’t. But perhaps growing up in a postcolonial country, and speaking a language that is so minoritised, translating into Maltese and not into imperial languages, becomes a necessity.

Il-Frammenti ta’ Saffo was published with financial support from the National Book Council.